Premonitions of disaster for Blue Dogs
November 24, 2009
What if you had the ability to stand on a tarmac and foresee a plane crash even as the plane taxied out to the runway? What if you could see and hear the terror, people bracing for impact, the screams, the prayers, the destruction, the flames and the lives ruined? Would you attempt to stop the airplane from taking off? Would you be paralyzed in abject horror? It would be terrifying.
Health care reform is a lot like that for Blue Dog Democrats.
They’ve talked themselves into the ludicrously self-delusional notion that what ails them and the president is that they haven’t yet passed the hundreds of billions of dollars of tax hikes and Medicare cuts that finance (albeit incompletely) ObamaCare.
This will long be a case study in the annals of abnormal political psychology. Tax hikes undid George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton (Bush lost his presidency, Clinton his congressional majority), and Medicare cuts undid Newt Gingrich (taking the air out of his “Republican revolution”). Obama’s Democrats are prescribing themselves a strong dose of both, in an exercise in self-destructive quackery.
They believe that Obama can’t afford failure, that’s it’s the defeat of ClintonCare that killed the Democrats in 1994. But such are the grave political and substantive flaws of ObamaCare that Democrats can’t afford success or failure.
If they pass it, they have tax hikes and Medicare cuts around their necks, as well as the increased insurance premiums the bill is sure to cause. If they fail, they’ve demonstrated their own ineffectual ideological fervor, while still putting themselves on record in favor of tax increases and Medicare cuts.
Congressional leadership has put fiscally conservative Democrats in a damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don’t situation. It will be interesting if they have the guts to stop that doomed flight before it becomes airborne.
Roy Ryder :
Date: November 24, 2009
Pelosi and Reid are two of the lousiest political strategists that have taken power in the legislative branch since WWII. With virtually no pushing by republicans, they have managed to paint themselves into a corner. Instead of backing away, they insist on bringing the brush as close to their toes as they can.